Automation Anywhere, a San Jose-based company that makes automation software, said Thursday that it has raised $290 million in Series B funding at a valuation of $6.8 billion.

The latest investment — just a year and a half after the San Jose-based company raised its first-ever venture round — turns Automation Anywhere into one of Silicon Valley’s highest-valued unicorn startups and follows on a $300 million funding round a year ago that valued the company at $2.6 billion.

Trending

“Never before has there been such a transformative shift in the way we work, with artificially intelligent software bots changing how people, processes and technology interact for productivity gains,” Automation Anywhere CEO Mihir Shukla said in a statement. “This new funding reinforces the promise of the RPA (robotics process automation) category and empowers our customers to achieve greater business agility and increased efficiencies by automating end-to-end business processes – bridging the gap between the front and back office.”

Series B

The Series B funding was led by Salesforce Ventures, the venture capital arm of San Francisco-based Salesforce.com
Inc. “Automation Anywhere makes it easier for Salesforce customers to
automate repetitive, manual tasks and focus on what matters most — the
customer,” Bill Patterson, executive vice president and general manager at Salesforce Service Cloud, said in a statement.

Additional funding came from existing investors that include Goldman Sachs and SoftBank Investment Advisers, which funded the company’s November 2018 round.
At that time, Shukla told the Silicon Valley Business Journal that
Automation Anywhere envisions that “this technology will change how we
work, across all industries and across every function.”

He
said last year that Automation Anywhere, which changed its name from
Tethys Solutions LLC in 2010, was profitable before, but that explosion
of bots that are automating business processes created a big new
opportunity. He also said that the SoftBank investment opened up “the
possibility of partnering with many of the portfolio companies that
SoftBank has invested in that are having the same sort of impact.”

The funding comes on the heels of massive layoffs at UiPath, Automation Anywhere’s New York-based rival. Shukla recently published a blog post assuring customers that, unlike Uipath, AA has been hiring and said the RPA market is “extraordinary,” adding that successful competitors are good for business.

“We
want and need the market to be competitive because especially
competitive markets are always better for customers and partners,” he
said at the time. “Working with our vast partner ecosystem, we’re on a
journey unlike any other. Journeys like this are never without their
twists and turns. But, on this journey, we plan to set untold records.”